Making a sign

This week I didn't really get much done.  After buying some wood with Patrick I started to re-deck the platform on the old Castle structure.  Then on Thursday some volunteers came from 'Children in Need' and helped dig out an old tree stump and screw some decking boards down.

It was one of those days like many days making things that you only really get to see what you have done in a cumulative way.  It's like clearing a big garden or renovating a house, a full days work hardly touches it.

I am also struggling to be poetic today I think there is a story about every animal having a certain number of heartbeats.  A mouse for example has a fast heart beat and lives a relatively short lifespan.  A tortoises heart beats really slow, like six times a minute and it lives forever. Darwin apparently collected a Tortoise called Harriot in the Galapagos islands in 1835 and it lived until 2006.  It appeared on Blue Peter when I was a kid I remember thinking at the time that it must have a really slow heart beat to live that long but the heart beat thing isn't true it's a made up fact.  The thing about poetry is true though because normally I could say something now with words that would make me feel connected to time and heartbeats but today I have run out of poetic writing. I am like an ancient tortoise and my heart is barely beating but I will live for a long time like Harriot - perhaps to much poetic nonsense can speed things up and kill you.

I am almost tempted to get practical now and think about the artists role in social cohesion, perhaps it is all this talk of Darwin and evolutionary theory.  Historically I always preferred Erasmus to his grandson Charles; Erasmus leading figure in the lunar society, poet scientist poly-math Lunatic  but some days the scientific drive in me to find some glimmer of truth  within a given situation makes me want to take my killing jar and pin something down like a dead butterfly or an idea.

For the record I bought some wood and we had to cut it to fit in the car.  Then I helped to build a big sign that read 'Thank you children in need from Pitsmoor adventure playground' then I took my best camera and took a photo of our volunteers from all over the north holding it up in-front of our dinosaur  aerial slide. I did this because I thought the image would get used and it would promote us nationally.  I took a step away from mending things and did something to look after our funders and raise our profile.  This is one of the things I think I have learned from working in communities but perhaps it's like the speed of an animals heartbeat and doesn't have that much to do with anything.